René Jules Dubos was a French-born American microbiologist, experimental pathologist, environmentalist, humanist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book So Human An Animal. He is credited for having made famous environmental maxim: “Think globally, act locally”
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by Rene Dubos
The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.
—Rene Dubos
Topics: Wilderness
The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.
—Rene Dubos
Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.
—Rene Dubos
Most of man’s problems in the modern world arise from the constant and unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization, the varied aspects of environmental pollution, the physiological disturbances associated with sudden changes in ways of life, the estrangement from the conditions and natural cycles under which human evolution took place, the emotional trauma and the paradoxical solitude in congested cities, the monotony, boredom and compulsory leisure
—Rene Dubos
Topics: Industry
The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.
—Rene Dubos
In practice, a global approach is needed when dealing with the problems of the spaceship earth which affect all of mankind. But local solutions, inevitably conditioned by local interests, are required for the problems peculiar to each human settlement.
—Rene Dubos
Topics: Earth
More can be learned from what works than from what fails.
—Rene Dubos
Topics: Learning
Man shapes himself through decision that shape his environment.
—Rene Dubos
Global thinking and local action both require understanding of ecological systems, but ecological management can be effective only if it takes into consideration the visceral and spiritual values that link us to the earth. Therefore ecological thinking must be supplemented by humanistic value judgments concerning the effect of our choices and actions on the quality of the relationship between humankind and earth, in the future as well as in the present.
—Rene Dubos
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